The success of 20% projects is a quasi-myth. Gmail is often touted, but you would do well to look up the employee # at Google of the inventor. Point being, you need (very) early hire clout or your 20% project isn’t going anywhere either.
It's not a myth. I had a successful 20% project when I was there and I was nobody special. I started an anti-bot system in 2010 and by 2014 it had become integrated into most of the top products. Last I heard there is a whole team working on it still, and there were also spinoffs.
That wasn't only a 20% project but a secret one! For several months I told my manager in daily standups that today was my 20% day, and that it was related to what the team did, but not what the project actually was. Everyone was cool with it.
It's possible that this was achievable only because I worked in an operational role. We had firefights that sometimes disrupted my ability to take the 20%, but you could partially bank the time and there weren't top-down imposed project deadlines.
I also used and experienced many other people's 20% projects whilst I was there. Many were small internal tools and systems that made working life easier but weren't the right size/shape to be staffed up as a full project with management attention, but some were products. At one point someone did a project that let you bid against yourself in the ad auction, to experiment with how to pay to remove ads. IIRC that was a 20% project. Google's early reputation for ML skill was established on the outside by Google Sets, a (for the time) astonishing demo that revealed Google was no mere fancy keyword matcher but had semantic understanding of words too. Pretty sure that was also a 20% project.
I felt pretty strongly at the time that the 20% policy was one of Google's secret weapons. The disdain and disinterest with which it's so often greeted outside of Google's walls is puzzling and sad, as is the quasi-myth that it didn't exist at all. I can believe that it existed to varying degrees depending on where and when you were, but, it's definitely not a myth.
>Gmail wasn't a 20%, I don't know why anyone thinks it is.
It's because some media stories used GMail as an example of a 20% project -- and -- those stories also end up being cited in places like Wikipedia:
- >Google is credited for popularizing the practice that 20 percent of an employee's time may be used for side projects. At Google, this led to the development of products such as Gmail and AdSense. :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_project_time#cite_note-:1....
The Time Magazine article is one of the places where they say GMail was not a 20% project:
- >Gmail is often given as a shining example of the fruits of Google’s 20 percent time, its legendary policy of allowing engineers to divvy off part of their work hours for personal projects. Paul Buchheit, Gmail’s creator, disabused me of this notion. From the very beginning, “it was an official charge,” he says. “I was supposed to build an email thing.”
: https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/#:~:text=Gmail...
The product they often presented as started in 20% time is Google news. I don't know the actual details, just this is what I remember from my time at Google (2006-2012).
Thanks for that list! One of my favorite Wikipedia-isms are these very “list of” pages.
I’m pretty sure it was Keyhole, for what it’s worth. Curiously, both Google and Keyhole are In-Q-Tel investments, although I’m not sure if that impacted/steered/influenced the acquisition, however.
> As of 2016, In-Q-Tel listed 325 investments, but more than 100 were kept secret, according to the Washington Post. The absence of disclosure can be due to national security concerns or simply because a startup company doesn’t want its financial ties to intelligence publicized.
> […]
> While In-Q-Tel is a nonprofit corporation, it differs from IARPA and other models in that its employees and trustees can profit from its investment. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that in 2016, nearly half of In-Q-Tel's trustees had a financial connection with a company the corporation had funded.
Which is to say, apparently insider trading isn’t just “illegal except when Congress/the President does it, except when it is illegal, actually,” if I’m parsing all this correctly; apparently In-Q-Tel gets special treatment too, in some cases.
